Welcome to Bimmerfest -- The #1 Online Community for BMW related information! Please enjoy the discussion forums below and share your experiences with the 200,000 current, new and past BMW owners. The forums are broken out by car model and into other special interest sections such as BMW European Delivery and a special forum to voice your questions to the many BMW dealers on the site to assist our members!

E46 (1999 - 2006) The fourth generation 3 Series (E46 chassis) was introduced in 1999 and set the standard for engineering and performance during it's years of production including being named to Car & Driver's 10 best list every one of those years! ! -- View the E46 Wiki

This was not a simple swap and involved a lot of cutting and welding to make this happen. Definitely something you do not want to do unless you know what you are getting into and have the right tools for the job.

Exhaust setup is "Headers -> Magnaflow Hi-Flow X Pipe cat (In case we do end up doing a dual exhaust) -> Y Pipe -> DynoMax VT Muffler (supposed to be 3 in/out but apparently dynomax just stretch a 2.5" to be a 3" in/out, sort of unfortunate but no big deal as a 540i OEM exhaust is 2.5")"

Fly By Vid:

We got the valve covers powder coated and installed an oil catch can.

Overall this project took 3 months. That being said, we did not work on this car every day, it was a little side project when we were not working on a customer's car and had time. We took about 1-2 working weeks to complete the job. Although if we were to tackle this again, it should definitely take us less than a week to complete.

Very nice! I was just reading up on a e30 build with a donor engine out of a 740i. How did you handle the ecu issues?

Sent from BimmerApp mobile app

Just took the DME/EWS/Key(Immobilizer) and swapped it over

Quote:

Originally Posted by GoForthFast

I know what I can't do!! Most of us have enough problem just keeping our stock e46 together with working parts. Kudos!

You do know what we really want to see is you out on the highway standing on it. Vids in our future?

Who is going to end up owning this car?

We do plan to make a few more videos in the near future. There are currently two that are in the OP (Startup and Flyby)

I personally Daily Drive the car.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johngreaver

Is it a 340 Cubc inch build or did you just dub the car 340ci lol

Quote:

Originally Posted by lgr122

I thought he ment 4liter engine in 3-series Coupe, makes "340CI", even when BMW never made such model.

The motor was taken from an e39 "540i" (4.4L Single Vanos Motor -- m62tub44) that was put into an e46 325"ci" -- "340ci"

BMW havent always been exact on the liter sizes with their models.
Examples:
e38 750i has a 5.4L v12
e31 8 Series known as the 850i/ci/csi has both a 5.0L v12 and a 5.4L v12
The e9x 335i, it's a 3.0L Turbo'd motor and 328i is a 3.0L
The e46 323ci has a 2.5L i6
e60 545i is a 4.4L (Double Vanos v8) and 550i is a 4.8

Slightly off-topic, but there were plans a while back to install a roots supercharger onto the motor but looking at it now, there will need to be more modifications that we do not want to currently spend the time into. Tune and Hood modification would be required. (Video below is the supercharger dyno). The tune wasn't near completion and was running 17+:1 AFR after 4k rpm. Even so it made 336whp and 333wtq with a higher average power rating than VF-E

The car is a 99 540iT 6 speed, we did the manual swap to that as well.

Here is a picture of what the e46 would have somewhat looked like if we did continue with the supercharger.